Police Suspect Increase in Prostitution Rings

The copious boxes of condoms, the sexual aids and the lack of furniture except for mattresses on the floor convinced Anaheim police they had the right place when they raided a suspected brothel.

The red light bulbs in every room clinched it.

“I’ve been in a lot of brothels, and very few I’ve seen actually had the red lights,” the traditional illumination that spawned the term “red-light district,” said Anaheim Police Sgt. Steve Walker. “They wanted the right atmosphere. They’re just making it look like a real TV-type brothel.”

When they raided the home in the 100 block of West Tiller Avenue on Sept. 12, police said, they broke up the second prostitution ring in Orange County involving illegal immigrants in as many days. And investigators say such rings are a growing problem that’s hard to crack.

On Sept. 11, Westminster police arrested two men and four women in a similar case in their city. And that same day, San Jose police, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police broke up a ring operating in California, Toronto and Vancouver.

Police are still trying to determine if the cases are related, but the techniques in such operations usually are the same, they say.

Smugglers bring women in their late teens and early 20s from Southeast Asia or Mexico to the United States, charging up to $40,000 for the trip and for their forged documents, police say. To pay off the debt, the women are forced to work as prostitutes, which few of them did in their native countries.

Immigration officials say about 100 women from Thailand alone are smuggled to the West Coast every month to be prostitutes.

“We suspect it is growing in popularity. As part of organized crime, it is very profitable,” Westminster Police Chief James Cook said.

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Westminster police also raided two other brothels in that city last year. Anaheim police broke up a ring in 1994 operating out of a hotel there. And after police shut down another in Rosemead last year, neighbors said they had thought it was just an unofficial language school.

The pimps typically rent a house with several bedrooms in a nondescript neighborhood, get the word-of-mouth advertising started and watch the customers and money roll in, Cook said. They move to a different house after two or three weeks to avoid detection. And though Cook said police are developing techniques to uncover the brothels--which he wouldn’t detail--”it’s extremely difficult unless the neighbors report it.”

Walker said the suspected Anaheim bordello was in a neighborhood with “kids running around, riding bikes and stuff, like anywhere anybody would live. Except, in the middle of it was a brothel.”

Ruth Lotzenhiser, who has lived in the house across the street for 40 years, said she counted 20 visitors to the home in an hour and a half one day.

“There’s something going on when you have that kind of traffic,” added Janice Wachowiak, who has lived on the street for 39 years. “It started in the morning and went all night, until about 2.”

And Lotzenhiser said she grew more wary when a well-dressed man came to her door one day, saying he had moved his family into the home.

“He was just too friendly. I thought he was giving me a con job of some sort,” she said.

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Walker said the four women working at the house had come from Mexico and were promised documents so they could work in restaurants. But in the meantime, the women were dropped off at the Anaheim home and told to wait there with the man later arrested on suspicion of being their pimp.

When men showed up at the house, the women were instructed to give them massages, and remove their clothes if the men did so.

“It was sad, actually,” Walker said. “They seem like normal, decent, clean young ladies.”

They told police they weren’t being held against their will. But they didn’t know where they were, had no access to a phone and no way to leave, police said.

“They were holding out for this identification to show up, so they could go into the restaurant,” Walker said. “They were taken advantage of, in my opinion.”

John Brechtel, acting officer in charge of the Orange County INS office, is skeptical. The women in these cases “know what they’re getting into,” he said. “They’re not that naive. But the lure of coming to the U.S. is just so strong.”

The pimps and prostitutes caught in these cases face fines and jail terms, and then the possibility of deportation, if they’re illegal immigrants. That puts the women “back to square one,” Walker said.

But he estimated the women made about $150 a week.

“I’m sure it was a lot more than what they were making in Mexico.”

The pimps and the smugglers make far more, however.

The man arrested on suspicion of pandering in the Westminster case had $13,000 in his pocket and $100,000 at his home, police said. He also had a small collection of BMWs and Mercedes, police said.

“It’s difficult to discourage, because there’s so much money associated with it,” Brechtel said. “It’s a very, very dirty business.”